Re: [malware-list] [RFC 0/5] [TALPA] Intro to a linux interface for on access scanning

Rene Herman
2008-08-08T02:06:56Z

On 07-08-08 16:16, Eric Paris wrote:

> Absolutely, I think that our solution needs worry much less about an
> actively attacking root process than Windows.

Note by the way that this assumption is being actively undermined by all
those companies releasing software released as big executable blobs that
you just have to chmod +x and run; as root if you want them in /opt, or
/usr/local/bin, or ...

Even when OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, RealPlayer, Flash, what
have you, might generally by themselves not be considered virusses both
the precedent they set and the opportunity for infecting systems by
offering those for re-download from elsewhere is worrying.

One of the more useful things the security crowd could do to keep the
above assumption valid would be working on a general "external software
installer" and getting all distributions to settle on it (which probably
needs a common divisor package and distro backends to feed it to the
native package manager).

Rene.